Linux

Configuring the firewall by hand using iptables is quite difficult. When we still used RedHat 8.1 we have been doing it but now not anymore. We have been using yast2 now for firewall configuration. An alternative to yast2 is fwbuilder. We tried it once and it seems to work although the code it produces is quite large compared to manual configuration. An obvious advantage is that fwbuilder can be used together with many different types of firewalls and operating systems (e.g. also Mac OS X).

My sister has sent me again an attachment which was encoded in the winmail.dat attachment. Sucks big time. Not only Linux users get pissed but also Macintosh users. Of course you can open it as long as you know how. On Mac OS X you need TNEF's Enough and on Linux you need tnef. Suse Linux 9.2 has an rpm that works well with KMail. Just click the winmail.dat and select "Open with tnef".

A while ago our server seems to have a hard disk failure as the following error messages kept coming up: hda: dma timeout error: [...] hda: dma_timer_expiry: [...] We exchanged the 20 GB HD against my old Mac's 4.7 GB HD and reinstalled the system. A friend of mine tried the "broken" 20GB HD on a Windows system and said it works fine.